Meetings

This morning Charlie called a meeting with the team as the unthinkable had happened. The game had been lost, Literally. The game save had disappeared and all of the unity work that had been completed was lost. This caused the whole team to go into panic and Charlie decided the best plan of action was to cut down the level sizes and remove most of my components from the game.

I then had to make a simplified version of the pause menu so it was easier to code by my team.

Today I had a private meeting with James and then a meeting with the team.

I spoke with James because I had a small breakdown yesterday which led to me losing my motivation and I felt it would be better to bring up the problem as soon as I could instead of letting it build up and suffer in silence. The main issues I was facing is that every time I set myself a personal deadline whilst relying on team members to provide me with vital assets, I always receive the assets late and get set back and I was worried it would come across as my fault and effect my grades. Also it feels like the team believe that the stuff I’ve been working on doesn’t contribute to the game and isn’t as important as other things so I tend to get pushed to the back quite a lot. Whenever I’ve asked for something which I need to move onto my next part of my tasks I get told that its something which can be completed last minute which it is not as everything I do takes time to perfect and complete. Also I never receive straight answers and get passed around the team for someone else to answer so I ended up feeling like a useless team member who doesn’t help. After speaking to James we decided it was a good idea to speak with the time to bring up the issues and to get them sorted.

As a team we decided to only set achievable deadlines and to work to what we know we can do. I cant write the Dialogue until the level design is complete so I’m going to work on completing the UI design with the rest of the assets that I received last night then once the level design is complete I can work on writing the Dialogue and recording the in-game voice acting.

Jade is going to work with Rhian to get the levels built within unity and start implementing the code and characters.

Charlie is going to research into camera and lighting coding as well as other bits we need to code.

James is going to upload the soundtrack for my cut-scene so that is complete and work on sound effects.

We’re getting super close to the end now with only 2 weeks to go and we are doing really well. The code is halfway there, all the assets are finished, the cut-scene is finished, animations are finished and music has been designed.

Our next focus is for the actual build and getting everything into unity.

For the next week:

Jade: Build the Levels.

Rhian: Continue coding and work on particle effects.

Charlie: more state machines, draw up character expressions and avatars for Aimee.

Today I met with Charlie and James to discuss the issues with the illustrations and came up with a few different options to fix my predicament.

I could use the sketches I have already been given and go over them using a cross-hatch/etching technique so it would hide any flaws and look more book illustration like.

Me and Charlie could create stylised motifs to represent each character and just draw basic shape and form

We could draw just 8 really well done beautiful illustrations.

Our new plan of action is charlie will do some very basic pencil sketches so I have the character designs down as that is what I struggle with the most and then I can go over them with colours and bold like to stylise them and give them more definition and grace.

I have been given until the end of next week to get everything done, i.e. UI design and Cut-scene animation,

The team is strating to progress really well. Rhian is halfway through the illustrations needed for my cutscene. Charlie has almost finished the character animations. I’ve finished recording all the voice acting. Jade has almost finished all the asset creation and James has been working on sound design.

We are hoping by the end of next week all of the “creation” for the game will be done so we can then spend the last two weeks coding the game and polishing it off.

Whilst I wait for the illustrations I will be working on UI design, blog posts and editing the voice acting.

This was our last meeting before the Easter break and a few changes have been made to the original plan.

Now Jade is working on digitising the assets and environments whilst Rhian now works on both the forest and town sections. Charlie has almost finished the mine shaft assets and now over the easter he”s going to begin working on new character designs to fit the Atheistic better as well as animations.

By the end of easter I will of hopefully finished the cutscene animation, the story design and narrative/dialogue and captured some sound designs as well as spoken dialect.

Once we get back from easter we will only have 4 weeks left and if all goes to plan we can finally put the game together and begin play testing and bug fixing.